eride wrote:

The combat system appears to be something that in its entirety is clearly a mess and looks to have fallen victim to a combination of feature creep and late-stage plugging of exploits/fun-holes somewhere along the way. There is zero variety in how to play the game from the combat-side. Whatever weapon resource you have the most access to is your go to weapon research path. You will do nothing but cram more and more of said weapon on tiny/small hull ships as you advance in research. Don't worry about having a variety of weapons. Don't worry about mixing up sizes of ship hulls. Don't worry about basically any element of a ship's design other than putting as many weapons (and the required weapon mod) and some balanced defenses. If there is not any depth to the combat mechanics, why even bother with it? I'd be having more fun with space combat in GC4 if every ship just had an aggregated ship power value which used random dice rolls to determine victory based on ship power. The system actually implemented in GC4 detracts from the fun of playing GC4.

The moment the devs had to make a minimum damage value of one despite the weapons and defenses at play to just make the mechanic "not broken" is the moment there should have been an "a-hah" we should redo this entire thing (to be fair, I am sure there were many warning signs... that is just an example I did personally read Brad post).